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| In the summer of 1999, I found myself in Okinawa, Japan... ...again. Right away I got busy looking for the right guys to play the blues. Put an add in the newspaper and met a helacious drummer, Rodger Scrivner. Rodger introduced me to the Okinawa music scene starting off at a local open jam night in a small underground club called "The Groove". For the next three months or so, I attended this jam night religeously, jamming everything from blues to jazz to classic rock. Rodger and I were hard at work looking for a bass player to round out our power trio. No luck, not a bass player to be found. Rodger got an offer to play in a new group with some old friends. We kept in touch and jammed out on occasion. Thank you for showing me the ropes there in Okinawa and being a good friend! The owner of "The Groove" is a guy named Gachapin, from the island of Miyako, just south of Okinawa. Gachapin is one of the most versatile and solid bass players on the island, in my opinion, he is the baddest! He and I spent many hours jamming out to all sorts of stuff, whatever came to mind. Gachapin was a very busy dude, he played in about half a dozen different groups. One night I asked Gachapin if he was busy and if he would be interested in being in another band. He said yes and now I was on the lookout for a drummer. Along came Tim O'Rourke, fresh out of the only country band in the Pacific Ocean, Roadhouse. We got together at Gachapin's for a little jam to see how things would go. Well, it went great, because Tim brought along the keyboard player from Roadhouse, Jim Kirk, and we had a blast. It felt good to all of us, we looked at each other and said hell yeah, let's do it. This happened around December 1999. We sat at the bar and discussed the name of the band. I thought "The Groove Cats" was appropriate since we started out in Gachapin's bar, "The Groove." The guys agreed plus they wanted my name up front, a huge honor, I was very flattered. So we became, "Clint Walker and The Groove Cats." Now the fun stuff, what to play? We chose a good blend of some Texas style blues, some hard hittin' Chicago blues, a touch of funk and soul, and some good ol' Delta boogie blues. I would say we had a good mix of some booty shakin' tunes. So we went to work, started rehearsing and promoting our thang. We did all of our rehearsaling at Gachapin's, he had a PA, drums, bass and guitar amps, very quick and easy set-up. On occasion we would get early crowds in and felt as if we were performing rather than rehearsing, and judging by the crowds reaction, we knew we were on the right track! We were asked to participate in a battle of the bands at a club called "The Hideaway." We had about a set and a half ready to go, all we needed were about four tunes to compete. Out of ten bands, we were the only blues band, everyone else was either heavy metal, death metal, thrash metal or alternative. The crowd was definitely a metal crowd, but they could feel what we were doing and accepted us with open arms. We hit the stage after an all female metal band, about in the middle of the line-up, talk about a change of pace. I think we opened up with SRV's, "Pride and Joy." From that famous intro to the last note of our final song, the crowd went nuts, we were all very pleased they dug what we were doing. When it was all said and done, we took a very pleased and a very unexpected 3rd Place. Didn't quite figure on actually ranking in with all of the great metal bands we shared the stage with. |
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